Issues when writing an xml file using xml.dom.minidom python

Question

I have an xml file and a python script is used for adding a new node to that xml file.I used xml.dom.minidom module for processing the xml file.My xml file after processing with the python module is given below

<?xml version="1.0" ?><Project DefaultTargets="Build" ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<PostBuildEvent>
  <Command>xcopy &quot;SourceLoc&quot; &quot;DestLoc&quot;</Command>
</PostBuildEvent>
<ImportGroup Label="ExtensionTargets">
</ImportGroup>
<Import Project="project.targets"/></Project>

What i actually needed is as given below .The changes are a newline character after the first line and before the last line and also '&quot' is converted to "

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<Project DefaultTargets="Build" ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<PostBuildEvent>
  <Command>xcopy "SourceLoc" "DestLoc"</Command>
</PostBuildEvent>
<ImportGroup Label="ExtensionTargets">
</ImportGroup>
<Import Project="project.targets"/>
</Project>

The python code i used is given below

xmltree=xml.dom.minidom.parse(xmlFile)
for Import in Project.getElementsByTagName("Import"):
   newImport = xml.dom.minidom.Element("Import")
   newImport.setAttribute("Project", "project.targets")
vcxprojxmltree.writexml(open(VcxProjFile, 'w'))

What should i update in my code to get the xml in correct format

Thanks,

Answer 1

From docs of minidom:

Node.toprettyxml([indent=""[, newl=""[, encoding=""]]])

Return a pretty-printed version of the document. indent specifies the indentation string and defaults to a tabulator; newl specifies the string emitted at the end of each line and defaults to \n.

That's all customisation you get from minidom.

Tried inserting a Text node as a root sibling for newline. Hope dies last. I recommend using regular expressions from re module and inserting it manually.

As for removing SGML entities, there's apparently an undocumented function for that in python standard library:

import HTMLParser
h = HTMLParser.HTMLParser()
unicode_string = h.unescape(string_with_entities)

Alternatively, you can do this manually, again using re, as all named entity names and corresponding codepoints are inside the htmlentitydefs module.